How closely is the Media Research Center working with President Trump’s re-election campaign? It’s now using Trump’s pollster. From an anonymously written June 9 post:
The Media Research Center (MRC) in coordination with McLaughlin & Associates on Tuesday released the findings of a new poll examining likely voters’ attitudes toward media coverage of the coronavirus shutdown and President Trump.
The poll found that 60% of likely voters, both liberal and conservative, believed some members of the media would like to see the shutdown drag on so that it hurts President Trump’s chances of reelection in November. Of those polled, 85% of self-identified conservatives and 41% of self-identified liberals agreed with the above statement.
“This is just more evidence of how at odds the American liberal media are with the American public,” said MRC President Brent Bozell.
All the MRC is doing here is confirming how its messaging — in this case, the narrative that the non-Fox News media hate Trump — is holding up. Given that 85 percent of conservatives buy this, the MRC is doing a fine job of preaching to the converted.
As it happens, the day before this press release was posted, McLaughlin & Associates issued a memo on behalf of the Trump campaign claiming that polls showing Trump losing are “skewed,” adding, “Let’s prove them wrong again.” This was followed by a letter from Trump’s campaign demanding that CNN retract a poll it didn’t like. CNN responded by noting that “this is the first time in its 40-year history that CNN had been threatened with legal action because an American politician or campaign did not like CNN’s polling results.”
The MRC is certainly not going to tell you that McLaughlin is considered to be among the worst political pollsters. Most notoriously, in 2014 a McLaughlin poll for then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor showed him up by 34 points two weeks before a Republican primary against his opponent Dave Brat; Brat ended up defeating Cantor by 11 points.
This is who the MRC and Trump are partnering with to advance their agenda. No wonder they seem a bit jittery about things.